NHM Next Campaign - FAQs | Natural History Museum of Los Angeles

• The County and the Natural History Museum (NHM) have a public/private partnership formalized by a funding agreement that was renegotiated in 2007. It will be in force for the next 75 years. County support is approximately 45% of the Museum's annual operating budget.
• The County owns most of the collections as well as the building. Private funds support Museum programs and such as exhibitions, scientific discoveries and research, School Visits, education outreach, First Fridays and Dinosaur Encounters. Currently, these programs serve more than one million people per year, onsite and in the community, including 250,000 schoolchildren free of charge.
• County and State support for NHM Next priorities total $45 million. The building infrastructure including the seismic retrofit has been made possible by this government support.
• New exhibits and programs will be made possible by private contributions totaling $90 million in support.

Two crucial portions of the 1913 Building re-opened in July 2010: The north wing, housing the building's extraordinary new Age of Mammals exhibit, and the historic Haaga Family Rotunda, featuring two new installation spaces. In July of 2011, the groundbreaking Dinosaur Hall opened to great acclaim. The next permanent exhibition to open in the 1913 Building will be a natural and cultural history of Southern California.

• On the north side of the Museum, construction is underway on a 3 1/2-acre urban wilderness garden, which will provide nature-themed education opportunities at the Museum. This space will transform the institution into an indoor/outdoor venue for the first time.
• As a part of these north campus renovations, a new car park and entrance are now open. These components turned large swaths of concrete into a more transparent, inviting Museum entrance from the street.
• The Nature Lab, a re-conceived family learning center, will open in 2012. Its indoor component will have similarities to the beloved Discovery Center, but its programs and exhibits will be redesigned to take advantage of our new outdoor gardens.
• Building on the success of Dinosaur Encounters, in which life-sized dinosaur puppets -inhabited by human puppeteers - thrill audiences, the Museum has added a saber-toothed cat to its stable of performers in the new Ice Age Encounters program. With this new addition, we can present more frequent programs and strengthen the connection to the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits (part of the Natural History Family of Museums), where this Ice Age creature's fossils have been famously excavated.
• Broadening the scope of the visitor experience, the Museum has also enhanced its existing series - including First Fridays, Sustainable Sundays, and B-Movies and Bad Science - and created new programming, such as expanded Critter Clubs (weekend events for 3-5 year olds) and an upcoming science-themed lecture series.

We are turning the Museum inside-out, bringing more treasures into public view, and exploring the science behind them more deeply. The transformation, therefore, is both physical and philosophical.

• In the past, the work of the Museum's scientists and historians was under-recognized, taking place largely behind closed doors. We have a new charge to connect the visitor experience with the research and discoveries of our staff. When a Museum paleontologist makes news with a new fossil finding, for instance, we put that fossil on display. We are de-mystifying science, showing it in action. We hope to better convey our relevance in research and scholarship. We also hope to inspire a future generation of scientists.
• With new gallery designs, we will double the number of the Museum's 35 million specimens and objects on public view.
• These new galleries include dynamic interpretive methods including multi-media kiosks and layered content, so that the visitor experience is always fresh and changing.
• When our North Campus is complete, the Museum will become a true indoor/outdoor experience for visitors. We will fully utilize a rare combination of resources: real estate, climate, extraordinary collections, and onsite experts and educators.
• The coming Nature Lab is an embodiment of our indoor/outdoor approach to the guest experience. Visitors will move back and forth between indoor collections and science topics and an outdoor environment where plants and animals can be interpreted in a living context.
• As the Museum's popular indoor programming gains outdoor components, we will develop a new slate of “citizen science” projects, allowing Museum scientists and visitors to collaborate on surveys, experiments, and long-term findings.
• Our improvements and upgrades to basic visitor amenities include “green” bathrooms, more seating, a new café and two new shops.
• The Museum will have a strong street presence with more welcoming orientation spaces, improved wayfinding and ADA access. Our new north entrance also creates access points near the coming light rail stations, which will bring new audiences to Exposition Park and alleviate parking stresses.
• Inside and out, 258,000 square feet of the Museum's public space will be renovated and improved.

• By July 2011, the Museum had raised $97 million, 72% of the $135 million goal of the NHM Next Campaign.
• Our Trustees and major donors have made leadership contributions that have brought the Campaign this far, and many plan to make additional gifts as the Campaign concludes.
• The Museum has long-term relationships with important California foundations and corporations as well as thousands of individual donors and members, all of whom are being invited to participate in the Campaign.
• The Museum has received a $7 million grant under State Proposition 84, the largest awarded.
• Trustee, foundation, and government support provides a firm basis for the NHM Next Campaign, but generous support from individuals is crucial to the successful transformation of the Natural History Museum.

• We have the most diverse visitors in of any cultural institution in Los Angeles. We do not reach a particular demographic; we reach the entire city.
• History, and a unique institutional legacy, is on our side. As we near our 100th anniversary, more generations of Angelenos have enjoyed our historic dioramas, special exhibitions and programming than at any other Southern California museum or attraction.
• We are the preeminent natural history institution in Southern California and a vital participant in the cultural life of the entire region. Nowhere else in Los Angeles can visitors find similar specimens, programs and resources for learning about the nature around them and the planet at large.
• No other museum in the Western United States offers our unique “big picture” perspective, exploring change and evolution over 4.5 billion years with evidence provided by more than 35 million specimens.
• No other museum in the U.S. offers an indoor/outdoor experience, in which research, collections, and living science experiments converge.

The goal is $135 million. The key elements of the Campaign include:

• New exhibitions including a new dinosaur hall, and a cultural and environmental exploration of Los Angeles.
• Teaching and learning gardens on more than 3.5 acres of reclaimed green space in Exposition Park.
• Expanded visitor amenities and wayfinding, creating a first-rate facility.
• A new Exposition Boulevard entrance with above–ground and underground parking.
• State-of-the-art exhibition strategies that address different backgrounds and learning styles.

• The Board has achieved 100% participation in the Campaign.
• We have a total of $52 million private support, including gifts from Trustees, other individuals, corporations and foundations. To date, including public and private support, we have raised $97 million dollars.

We are fortunate to have a building that is both an architectural and a civic gem.

• Blessed with this new space, we have transformed our approach to exhibits. We display extraordinary specimens, but then go further, also exploring the ways that scientists discover, excavate, and research these specimens. We put both the specimens and the science behind them into a context of larger planetary processes, such as environmental change and evolution.
• Rather than create a new facility, our project re-envisions and transforms the galleries that form the foundation for our programs. The plans include programmatic changes, greater interactive learning, and educational enhancements that will serve visitors with diverse backgrounds, language needs, and learning styles.
• With this approach, we take a leading role in inspiring stewardship for our planet.

The renovations and new master plan are led by CO Architects and principal Jorge de la Cal and Cordell Corporation led by its president Don Webb, with Matt Construction. The new exhibits in the renovated galleries are the responsibility of Dr. Karen Wise, Vice President of Exhibits and Public Programs, who is working with a slate of world-class exhibit design firms.

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Our challenge was to enact a 21st century renovation without destroying the building's grandeur, and to ready a historic structure for state-of-the-art exhibits. Our solution included a seismic retrofit with a high-tech system never before attempted on such a wide scale, so that the infrastructure improvements are invisible and internal. This cleared the way for a restoration of our brick exteriors, the beloved stained glass dome, and skylights and arched windows that were previously dark.

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The physical improvements are only one component of our transformation-over the past several years the Museum has developed plans for the complete re-envisioning of our position as one of the region's foremost cultural institutions. The Board has committed itself to a long range strategic plan that includes significant audience development and marketing initiatives.

Based on current research, our NHM Next plans include:

• Creating a program of temporary exhibitions to encourage repeat visitors, but retaining iconic exhibitions like the diorama halls that are a hallowed part of the permanent Museum experience.
• Anticipating a dramatic 50% increase in School Visits (currently 200,000 schoolchildren visit free of charge). The Museum provides a memory-making field trip for children, but the Museum is also a valuable resource for their teachers. We provide free lesson plans and tours that meet the State's Board of Education curriculum standards.
• Targeting more than one million annual visitors once the new galleries open in 2012, marking an almost 100% increase in attendance. We are on track to meet this goal: Attendance after the opening of Age of Mammals has increased 40% and the first few weeks of the Dinosaur hall saw a record of more than 60,000 visitors - an increase of nearly 70% over the same period last year.

The dioramas and their backgrounds, painted by Work Projects Administration (WPA) artists in the 1930s, are registered in historic landmarks lists and are consequently protected by law. Therefore, the beloved dioramas will remain, but we update them constantly with new specimens and labels that incorporate the latest scientific research. The dioramas are a vital part of the Museum's history and education mission. With an on-staff muralist and taxidermist, the Natural History Museum has the only active, ongoing diorama program in the country.

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Both will be essential to our growth and ongoing success. We encourage donors to think about their NHM Next Campaign gifts as special, long-term investments and as gifts, payable over a period of years, which come from assets. On the other hand, annual gifts are those that can be made from income. We also ask donors to consider bequest gifts, which will help build our endowment to secure the future of the Museum.

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The physical transformation of our Exposition Park facility will not affect the Page Museum, but the philosophical transformation will certainly have an impact. We have expanded our family and adult programming at the Page Museum and its grounds. We have also worked to heighten the profile of the relevant scientific work engaging Page researchers.

Most recently, Page scientists have been focused on the astonishing new discoveries at the tar pits, revealed when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art excavated its new underground parking structure. These discoveries double the size of the Museum's Pleistocene Era collection, including a rare mammoth, one of the largest ever found. We are making strides to communicate the connections, programmatic and scientific, between the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits and the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park.

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We are in the midst of an ambitious slate of permanent exhibition opening. Media coverage, subsequent critical acclaim, and a higher advertising profile have resulted in spiking attendance numbers. We have momentum and visibility. The transformation is underway.

You can give a gift at a moment that will matter more than any other time of the institution's history, because this transformation is the biggest in its history. Your dollar invested here will leverage more change than in any other institution in Los Angeles.

This is a unique opportunity to take a leadership position in Museum accessibility and education for the broader public. Over the last 100 years we have touched generations of Southern Californians, and it is our responsibility to ensure that future generations experience the natural world and the special access to scientific inquiry the Museum provides.

Unlike other museum campaigns, this effort is not just about new exhibitions and buildings. Within those new physical spaces and visitor experiences, there is something else afoot.

The Museum is becoming a crucial hub of inquiry and conversation; it provides expertise and informed insights on some of the most pressing challenges of our time. Our transformation gives us the power to spark the minds of future scientists and inspire stewardship for the planet.

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